Faene
<--The Many God of Disease Putrid pestilence passes along the plague. The Plague God gifts mortals with death and with appreciation of life. Every soul is temporary, let illness remind the lax. Faene is not a cruel god, he is one of equality; kings and paupers, commanders and grunts, pig and priestess, the Plague God favors them all the same. It is only those who study his realm that he favors. His sigil is the maggot or a bird's skull. His domain is both sickness and cure. Those who are ill sing his songs and seek out his devout. Plague doctors are the learned who seek to spread his blessed medicine. Plague bearers are the chosen who spread his deathly gifts in secret, ultimately blessed to suffer it themselves. He is the rot in flesh, the poison in ale, the cough in lungs, and the venom in snake's fangs. -- -- -- "Within the unspoken incantations of magic and alchemy dwells contagion and pestilence. A craft so vile that it prefers no creator, no master, and withers all life it encounters. It is a force driven by no morality, control, or purpose. It exists to exist, and survives to continue surviving. Despite its cold, unresponsive, unwarranted compulsion, illness is not inherently malevolent. Many of the living have difficulty in accepting the necessities of death. There must be checks and balances to all of life's conditions. Without sickness, fewer men, women, and children are sent to the afterlife. They continue on, and the lands thrive until a critical threshold is reached. The world can not sustain itself upon its supra maximal population, and begins to waste away rapidly. The remaining turn against each other in causality, blame, and fear. Mass extinction of entire species ensues. Little, if anything, remains of a world that once was. The necessities of illness only progress. From the perspective of evolution, it is well to assume that a particular species will come to dominate the lands or waters in which it resides. Without disease, such a species will remain dominate and oppress any such opportunity another species could have in becoming the new, dominant species. No species will be able to grasp the charitable mentality of placing another species before its own; it is the heart of survival to cling to such convictions. There must be equality. There must be death of dominant species to bring about new life. Dominant, social beings will often construct cities in which to thrive in. As time lingers, these cities grow at exponential rates and develop advanced social and technological practices in rapid pacing. This economy of individuals eventually reaches a peak if left unchecked; it will reach a peak as all things do. And as all summits are reached, they then must be descended. The society fails because it is impossible to sustain perfection. It is never meant for mortals to construct an ultimate society. It would collapse within itself. Sickness is caution to this end. Sickness is the ubiquitous balance. It is the solvent that wipes the slate clean before there is no room left to write. Disease is not only a balance, but a gift to the living. It encourages the living to find treatment, defense, and/or precautionary means to their safety. To prepare before it's too late. Disease encourages great minds to arise and propose inventions and technology that can combat sickness successfully. It progresses a mortal's understanding and development of technology; these applications can then be applied elsewhere and create an easier, more convenient lifestyle for everyone. In addition to innovation, mortals gain the knowledge of anatomy and physiology of their own bodies. They begin to understand the inner workings of their race and learn the advantages they can take through understanding how their bodies work, in addition to more easily combating disease. In the presence of sickness, perhaps the most important aspect of all is unveiling the true heart of a society. In a civilization's most dire moments, when survival is being threatened, the priorities of individuals will come out in their most genuine forms. It is here that the hearts of men are tested. The strong will push onward together and their civilization will be given another chance. Whereas the weak will manipulate and scheme to gain advantage over one another, but ultimately perish alone. In such an end, the civilization is not worth saving. In plague and woe, there is restoration; a cure exists for all things infectious and contagious. However, to be cured of infection is not a process of being cleansed or purified. It is an act of stalling the inevitable, of survival. It is, of all things, a necessary endeavor. To survive is to grow stronger, to develop in some way. And just as the mortal survives, so will the disease. The two will be locked into perpetual struggle, one attempting to usurp the other as if such an end would lead to a better tomorrow. Mortals and illness, as if mutually obligated, gain exponential endurance against their environments, perhaps approaching the precipice of being each other's only remaining apex predator. A contest of two: the survival of the fittest. Mortalkind is thus a cycle akin to that of life. However, in the slow, agonizingly slow end, there can only be one. And each side's chances are as favorable as Faene is prejudiced: evenly." - from ''The Interpretation and Philosophies of Pestilence, ''written by a Kadarran Theologist -- ((Excerpt written by Bacon_Bits)) Category:Destiny of the Fated Category:DOTF Religion